Dress for you

Tag: Simplicity 5723

Thanks to , here’s a photo of another — this one was taken at a lovely event for the earlier this month in Madison, Wisconsin. The two spiffy gents in the photo are Simon Winchester and Jesse Sheidlower — so you get some bonus wordsmith-candy in your (ir)regularly-scheduled dress post today.

The dress is in this fabric:

I’ve had this fabric since November, 2008, or at least, that’s the datestamp on the file on my hard drive. Could have been earlier, but this looks suspiciously like a saved-it-from-the-eBay-listing photo. It’s a nice heavy linen-y fabric, without actually (I think) being linen, which is my favorite way for fabric to be linen-y.

When I have a minute and the dress is not in the wash (I’ve worn it every week since I’ve made it, I’m pretty sure) I will take a picture of it on the dressform, so you can see how nicely I matched the (broken, which makes it easier) plaid across the skirt panels. Until then, you will have to take my word for it.

My only problem with this dress is that I don’t (yet) have a cardigan to match it. It’s not any of the various pinks and maroons I have in my Cardiganary (that’s my new word for “cardigan library”), and I haven’t started my ambitious new project of carrying around a swatchbook of all the fabrics of dresses I have made so that I can match cardigans anytime, anywhere. (My current process is to just say “eh, maybe it matches?” and buy the cardigan. Which has not yet ended happily, especially in the very tricky “teal” family of colors.)

You also can’t see in the photo that this dress looks nice with a very skinny black patent belt. Belts are my new cardigans, I’m now trying to amass them in every color. (This can only end in tears.)

I have a couple more exemplars to post — here’s one, in a dim and fuzzy photo:

The pockets on this one are lined in camouflage:

Ignore the unclipped threads, if you please. They’re gone now …

That’s more what the color looks like — it’s green denim from my trusty friends at .

I’ve been wearing this one with a bright orange sweater and belt — that’s my idea of fun. This dress in denim is a dream to wear, very comfortable yet stiff enough to hold its shape. I have some maroon denim that will soon find an incarnation in this pattern, and I’m really, really toying with the idea of a white denim dress. I don’t think I’ve had an all-white dress since high school graduation. I’m completely sure that after ten minutes on my person, it would no longer be an all-white dress, yet still I persist in this fantasy of a white denim dress. Talk me out of it?